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On the other hand, as it turns out, in situations like this, raising taxes may be a necessary evil!

Here's why:

When the government cuts taxes, it doesn't cut spending. "Starving the Beast," as the policy is called, doesn't work, because "the government has a credit card with no debt limit."

A study by a pair of liberal economists in 2004 showed how thoroughly the desire to cut taxes had been made compatible with the desire to spend money and expand the government’s power. Among congressmen who had signed a pledge never to raise taxes, presumably on starve-the-beast grounds, more than 80 percent nevertheless voted for the mostly unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003. More than 70 percent of them voted for the lard-packed farm and transportation bills in Bush’s first term.

Public outrage, the other ingredient required in order to cause the government to cut spending, is non-existent. In order for there to be public outrage, you have to hit people in their wallets.

When you make them pay for government benefits out of their own pockets, in other words, voters will want fewer of them. The journalist Jonathan Rauch put Niskanen’s point more pithily: “Voters will not shrink Big Government until they feel the pinch of its true cost.”